Medical devices are the driving force behind the advancement of clinical medicine

       At 5:00 a.m., Chen woke up from his sleep, his chest like a boulder, the pain was unbearable. The family called “120”, jerking his chest and wiping his back to do a busy job. An hour later, Chen was lying on the operating table in the hospital’s catheterization room. Sterilization, sheeting, local anesthesia, puncture, and placement of the tube. A needle of contrast was injected into the aorta, and the doctor found that the right coronary artery of Chen was completely occluded! Ten minutes later, a small metal stent was delivered into the occluded vessel of the heart, and another imaging showed that the right coronary artery opened and blood was reinjected into the ischemic heart muscle – Lao Chen’s heart was revived and his life was saved.  This is a common scene in most hospitals in China at the municipal level and above.  Thanks to the development of alloys that can be implanted for long periods of time, the small stent made from these alloys, the various catheters, guidewires and other interventional materials used to deliver these stents, the people who invented the standard puncture placement technique, the digital subtraction angiography equipment and image display equipment necessary to perform this procedure, and all of these medical devices that have been developed in recent decades. Thanks to the continuous progress in the development of all these medical devices in recent decades, the implants in the body have become lighter, more flexible and biologically friendly, and the interventional diagnostic and therapeutic devices in the body have become smaller, more precise and more powerful, so that millions of patients like Lao Chen can receive the simplest, fastest and most minimally invasive treatment, but achieve the best efficacy, the least risk and the fastest recovery, pulling them back to a healthy life from the disease.  Looking back to the 1960s, the increasingly fierce competition among developed countries in space and military industry drove unprecedented progress in the research and development of precision metals, synthetic materials and various precision instruments and equipment, and one of the side effects was to promote the swift start of medical device research and development. For example, the characteristics of nickel-titanium alloy discovered by military research institutions, but a large number of applications in clinical medicine as an internal replacement or implants. The manufacture of large industrial and military precision instruments and equipment based on the development of large medical treatment equipment, such as DSA, CT, MR, ultrasound, endoscopy, multi-functional analyzers, etc.; research and development of a variety of metal, polymer synthetic materials based on the emergence of such as artificial larynx, artificial joints, artificial valves, artificial blood vessels, etc.; recently combined with electronic, computer, information technology invented functional, intelligent equipment, such as Surgical robots. In short, the progress of medical devices has been rapidly changing and has been integrated into all aspects of medical basic research and clinical diagnosis and treatment, promoting the medical career from the primitive days of slash-and-burn into the era of high-tech modernization.  It is true that high-tech products bring high costs, and more medical equipment applications bring increased medical costs.  However, what is the most basic purpose of human existence? Is it not the continuation of life? And the highest form of survival is to survive in good health. All political, economic, military, diplomatic, industrial and cultural changes and progress, if not aimed at improving the quality of life, is a violation of the fundamental needs of human survival, will certainly be abandoned.  The medical device industry is a terminal industry, and the vigorous development of the medical device industry will not only not cause negative economic investment, but will drive many upstream industries to better development. Because, the upstream precision machinery and instruments, metal alloy material smelting and configuration, optical and electronic instruments, chemical industry, biochemical industry, computer, artificial intelligence and so on series of industries can get the impetus to move forward. And the progress of these industries will certainly benefit the progress of new medical devices, benefit our deeper research and understanding of life, and thus benefit the health of human existence. A country cannot be a strong country if its medical device industry stops moving forward, or if it does not have leading medical device products.  May our own medical device industry become more developed, more progressive and more advanced, so that when people have health problems, the causes can be diagnosed faster and more non-invasively, and they can receive more minimally invasive and convenient treatment and better and more effective health management and guidance, and may in the near future, the emergence of various molecular, genetic and other medical devices related to the basic laws of life will enable us to fundamentally solve the problem of disease occurrence and development, so that everyone can have access to the medical device industry. We hope that in the near future, the emergence of various molecular, genetic and other basic laws of life diagnostic devices will enable us to solve the problem of disease occurrence and development at the root, so that everyone can be healthy and happy until “the end of life”.